For those interested in issues such as climate change, social inequity, and the financial crisis, join me in a dialogue to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with sustainability and the role of business in a sustainable society.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Putting the "Public" Back into "Publication"

Let’s talk about the academic publishing industry. Or, as I like to refer
to it, knowledge hoarders!

I’m an academic. It
is my job to publish research
in reputable journals to contribute to knowledge, knowledge that tells us important things
like causes of cancer, whether climate change is real and human driven, whether
particular foods are more or less associated with diabetes and obesity, and, this is true, that Pacific
herring farts, unlike human farts, are essential in helping to build social bonds

Now there
are different types of publishing. We’re
most familiar with the publishing of books and textbooks. But I want to talk today about the
publication of academic articles. They
key difference between an academic article and say a book is that the article
is vetted by expert anonymous reviewers (unknown to the author) so that the
reader has some assurance that what the article is saying is in fact reflective
of sound science. Academic publications filter
out hearsay, myth, and fear-mongering bullshit that tends to come from a
simple google search and sometimes books. Could you imagine
if we devised regulatory policy based on the seemingly airtight consensus on
the internet that eating gluten is unhealthy?

Yet, here’s the rub…although the word “public” is in the
word “publication”, public access to the knowledge inside these publications
couldn’t be more private.

There are three main publishers of academic knowledge –
Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell.
Together they own the access rights to 42% of all academic
journals. To put that differently, they
own the access rights and are
thus the gatekeepers to 42% of knowledge in the academic community. Things haven’t been that bad since Immortan
Joe from Mad Max Fury Road controlled
the flow of water to desperate citizens of a parched world or when Donald Trump
controlled what was considered real news.

But unlike Immortan
Joe who likely paid the high costs associated with drilling and accessing that
water, publishing companies don’t pay the salaries of the scholars nor do they
cover any expenses associated with the research they conduct. Instead, the cost of research falls on the
backs of you, the taxpayer, through the salaries and expenses public colleges
and universities pay its professors.
This means that even though taxpayers are paying to produce knowledge,
they can’t access that knowledge unless they fork over an average $30 for a single article and $4,000 to $20,000 for a single journal
subscription paid for byuniversities and colleges that students access through
tuition fees. It is no coincidence that
there is a strikingly strong correlation between student tuition fee increases over
the last two decades and journal subscription fee increases that universities
and colleges have little choice but to pass on to students.

Think about that for a minute. That’s like paying $45,000 for a car and then
being prohibited to use the car until you pay the car dealer a monthly fee to
use it. Or that’s
like buying a house from Rose and John and not taking ownership until you pay
them a monthly fee to use it. That’s fucked up!

Publishing
companies claim that there are enormous costs associated with distributing knowledge
that justify the fees. Printing costs have
become incredibly expensive…all that paper, and the cost of binding the
journals, not to mention shipping journals to the many colleges and
universities around the world...that’s crazy expensive.

Except, the Internet happened!

So what costs do these companies sustain to justify these
prices? What value are they adding to
knowledge creation? According to a 2012 article in Nature , they provide a
wide range of services. They edit the
draft of the article, they select scholars to review the work to determine
whether it is suitable for publication, they work with the author to enhance
the article, they translate the author’s illustrations to journal level
formatting, and they provide the platform for access along with “other
enhancements”. That sounds helpful.

But there's
one problem, it’s bullshit. By
the time the article is accepted to the journal, the draft is typically well written
by the authors, requiring very little editing by the publisher. But get this, Elsevier recommends that
authors hire an editor to proof edit the work.
In fact, Elsevier offers editing services at, get this, $115 a pop for a
proof read.

Wait, what?

Taxpayers are paying the scholar to prepare
their draft and then are also paying publishing companies for the editing of
the manuscript, something these companies say is part of what justifies their
high fees. Back to my house purchase
analogy with John and Rose. Not only are
you paying these former owners a monthly fee to use the house that you bought, you’re also paying
John and Rose’s expenses to live in their new house.

Now what about the cost of finding experts to review
submitted articles, another of the many services publishing companies allegedly provide? Every journal has an editor, typically with a team of senior editors who
manage this process. These people
ultimately decide whether an article is to be published based on reviews from
anonymous or blind experts. Both the
editors and the blind reviewers are not employed by the publishing
company but are instead scholars, employed by you, the taxpayer. This means that the publishing company is
completely separate from the process by which an article is determined suitable
for publication and therefore incurs no cost associated with this. Let me rephrase that, they do not in any way
add value to the determination of whether something should or should not be
published.

Any remaining services they provide add virtually negligible
value to the knowledge creation and dissemination process. In fact, I would argue that in their pursuit to restrict access to
knowledge, their net contribution to the public good is negative.

But the real kicker that puts to shame any argument that
publishers have costs that justify their exorbitant fees is that the average
profit of these companies is around 40% of their revenue. That means that for every dollar they make
from universities, only 60 cents is used to cover their costs. Apple, one of the most successful companies
in the world uses an average of 77 cents to cover one dollar of revenue, over
the last 10 years, while Google uses 78 cents in the last couple of years. Exxon, one of the most hated companies in the
world, peaks at around 88 cents in costs for every dollar.

Things have gotten so ridiculous that Harvard University,
one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, has cut some subscriptions as
a way to control costs, demonstrating that even such a giant of an institution
with billions of dollars in endowments, is vulnerable to predatory publishing. That’s like Vladimir Putin pulling out of
Ukraine because, well, the price of oppressive politics has become much too
crazy these days.

But more sinister is what differentiates high
quality journals from low quality journals i.e. the $20,000 subscription versus
the $4,000 subscription that universities and colleges pay. Fascinatingly there is virtually no
difference in cost of the publishing company between these two sets of
journals. The reason why there is such a
price difference is that the quality of the research is so much higher in the
$20,000 journal. That is, there is much
more demand for these journals, which drives up the price. But as I said, publishing companies have
nothing to do with that variation in quality. Normally, when consumers pay more for product A than B, it’s because the
producer of Product A is providing the consumer more value due to some additional capital investment over time. But, in this case,
the publishing company’s costs are unchanged because the taxpayer is footing the
bill by paying more for scholars who publish high quality work. In actual fact,
the taxpayer (i.e. the public) is getting kicked in the ass not only with high research costs but
with footing the bill for the $20,000 subscription fee. That’s nuts!
Think about that for a minute!
That would be like paying for the materials in a smartphone, the labour
to put it together, the shipping to get it to your hands, the labour at the
retail outlet and then on top of that paying the ridiculously high retail price of $600 to purchase it. On the one hand, you’re saving Apple from
incurring these costs and on the other, you’re giving Apple an extra $600. But unlike Apple or its competitors, publishing companies incur no marketing costs to convince you to pay the $600 because you don't have a choice!

As a business professor, the sad thing is that
this is what we teach business students to do. To business education, this is an impeccable
business model, but to society this is a disaster. How impressive is it to have your customer
not only pay you a high price but to also have your customer pay for the costs
to produce what you’re selling. Let me
be honest…business students who think of these sorts of business models will
get an A+ in the typical strategy or entrepreneurship class even though at the
end of the day the public gets a boot in the ass and society is worst off
because important knowledge is restricted.

As an academic, how my compensation is determined and how I’m promoted is based on whether
I write stuff that gets locked into this private club of knowledge privilege. I therefore contribute to an infernal
machine that does nothing but screw the public and income-poor students. What an asshole!

So what can we do? Tweet your support to
#puttingpublicbackintopublication and as a taxpaying citizen who pays professor salaries
and expenses to do research, pressure professors around the world to publish in
open access locations. Otherwise, as a
society, we should collectively fire them…including me!

And don’t
fall victim to those seemingly independent people who opine that open source
would be a disaster in that it would erode knowledge quality because scholars
would simply purchase journal space to cover shoddy research. There is no solid empirical evidence to
prove this. In fact, a study by Stuart Shiever (professor
of computer science and faculty director of the Office of Scholarly
Communication at the Harvard Library) noted an extremely high positive
correlation between the quality of the journal and its APC.